I recently had a conversation with a friend of mine who is also in a creative profession, who wanted to start a blog and asked for me help. She asked me, “What’s the best way to get traffic to my blog?” Believe me, I’m not an expert in web analytics or SEO, but I do okay for myself, so I started out with basics, and we chatted a little about all of the things involved in growing and maintaining your online audience. After discussing all of the work that would go into this pet project that she wanted to take off she said,
“But there’s always the possibility that no one will care.”
To be perfectly honest, there is a greater chance for an online business to fail than succeed. There is so much content out there. So much competition. So much noise, and advertising, and mass marketing, and I could go on…
But the important thing for us to realize is this: If you believe in it, you can put into words why this thing that you do is important (aka your mission statement – if you don’t have one, you need to write one ASAP, at the very least for yourself), and you have the motivation to keep pursuing it despite adversity, then it is worth doing. It is worth doing, because anyone who thought “Wouldn’t it be cool, if…” made something that they and other people now take for granted.
Necessity may have been the mother of invention in a pre-digital world, but today enjoyment is.
To put this back into a practical space, if you’re a photographer looking for more clients, and you think to yourself, “Wouldn’t it be cool if…I could do family portraits on a mountaintop.” or, “Wouldn’t it be cool if…I livestreamed my senior sessions.” or, “Wouldn’t it be cool if…I throw a party for all of my clients from last year.” Whatever it may be that interests you and speaks to your audience – show them who you are, give them the experience that only you can give, and support your goals through the content that you put out there! Because the one thing I know for sure is that no one will ever care if they never got a chance to.
The Femme Photog 